Before you ever begin to brainstorm about which content you need, you must understand exactly what you have. Kristina Halvorson offers the basics on how to create a content inventory, do a quantitative content audit, do a qualitative content audit and approach specialized content audits.

This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

When I’m speaking about content strategy at conferences, I often ask my audience, “How many of you really know, in detail, what content you have on your website today and where it all lives?”

Even in crowds of 400 to 500 people, I usually see only one or two raised hands.

This is a problem.

Before you ever begin to brainstorm about which content you need, you must understand exactly what you have. Before you can decide where to focus your web improvement efforts (and allocate your budget), you need to know exactly what needs improving and why.

And to know these things, you need to do a content audit.

Seeing is Believing

A web content audit is a full accounting of the content your organization currently has online.

Auditing web content—especially a large website—might sound tedious and time-consuming. It can be. But the results are extraordinarily valuable. In fact, an audit is your key tool for making a business case for any web content project.